Rise of the Unschooled

My daughter is scared, and she doesn't want to talk about it.

At her school and all around Finland, the flags sat at half-mast. There was a school shooting in southern Finland yesterday, where a twelve year old killed another student, and seriously injured two others. These kinds of events are very rare in Finland for many reasons, but it is likely that they will increase in frequency. When I say rare, this is the fourth school shooting in Finland, with the first now thirty five years ago, in 1989.

Smallsteps heard more about this at school, where they observed several silent moments throughout the day. And, to make matters worse for her, the older sister of one of her classmates is friends with one of the victims, so there was more talk about that.

Smallsteps doesn't understand how someone can do this to someone else.

My wife had talked to her when she got home from school, but Smallsteps was reluctant to speak much, because she is so sad about it. When I got home from work, I sat holding her on the couch and said that she can ask questions, and bit by bit she started to open up. However, before she started speaking, we had a conversation about why it is good to speak about things that make us sad or scared, and also about the topics that we don't want to talk about, because that way, we have a chance to understand and potentially find solutions.

The twelve year old was soon caught, and the reason they gave as their motive, is that they were bullied. This excuse is akin to a thief saying they are poor, or a rapist saying they were horny - they don't excuse the behavior.

Nor does the age.

While the conversation will focus on gun access, mental health and bullying in schools, what the conversation will omit is the discussion around the degradation of society, the failing of communities, and the increasing drive for individualism in an on-demand environment, combined with a decreasing focus on emotional control. The newspapers won't talk about how parents no longer parent, or how interpersonal skills are near nonexistent. Because these are essentially outlier events, won't acknowledge that this is a social problem at all. That while these kids are outliers, they are also products of their environment, the one that they have been encouraged to embrace.

There are always psychological and emotional outliers in society.

It is the way a normal distribution works. For every genius, there is the idiot on the other side. For the kindest person, there is also the cruelest. And, we are all on the spectrum, under the right circumstances, we all have the propensity to be a positive or a negative force on those around us. But, what people seem to ignore is that while we are all individuals, we are also pretty predictable as a group. And, the trend of the group isn't moving toward a healthier direction.

So many people want to be considered normal, but seem to skip the part that "normal" today means to be overweight, poor, and unhappy. In the past we used to aspire to be better than we currently are by looking toward those who inspire us. Now, we don't want to grow, we don't want to improve, so we look to normalize people like as, by demanding "representation" in the media, society, leadership. When we keep looking to populate groups of people by average percentages, it is a race to the bottom.

What happened to wanting the best person for the job?

And, because we have created a content landscape that is filled with false transparency, and all-access passes, what is there to aspire to, who is there to look up to - if you had a child, who would you want them to rolemodel? A morally corrupt politician, a sexually abusive music artist, a lying social influencer? Forget the children for a moment, who is there to look up to as an adult? Even the superheroes have been downgraded with flaws, to make them more relatable, to bring them down to our level, barely distinguishable from the villain who plays their nemesis.

I don't want to be represented. I want to be inspired.

As Smallsteps and I were discussing, to find solutions to problems, we first have to understand the problem. A school shooting isn't due to gun availability, or bullying - but mental health does factor into it. It isn't about more psychologists though, as they are part of the problem. What I believe we need is to take a long, hard look at the culture we have created, the habits that we encourage, and the conditions that we have built, and recognize that we have created an environment that raises mental illness, that raises physical illness, and lowers the pool of people who we can actually look up to and admire. Not because they are the biggest assholes on the screen, but because they are the best people in our community.

As much as I would like to, I can't protect Smallsteps from the world. She is going to experience terrible circumstances, terrible people, terrible events and have terrible feelings arise. Avoiding discussing what is uncomfortable and scares us, doesn't protect us from it, it makes us even more reactive to it. Which is why we have a couple of generations of people who are triggered so incredibly easily, and feel that they are justified, entitled to overreact with impunity. They think that violence is justified, because someone made them feel bad.

We have rewarded victimhood.

And normalized pathetic.

Is this what we want our society to be?

Taraz
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